I can't count how many times I've reinstalled Windows on my workstation at home. Sometimes it's because of my obsessive need to keep a clean system; other times it's because I've hosed my system with my multiple-system boot setup. Regardless, I've been wasting my time. I could have been imaging my computer this whole time.
So now I've wised up. Just today I made a "perfect" Windows install, with SP2, my anti-virus software, my preferred settings, and a couple of my most commonly used programs. Now that that's done, I use a Linux Live CD--which for the uninitiated, is a Linux bootable CD--and now I'm imaging my Windows partition with Linux.
How, you might ask? It's simple!
Once Linux boots up, I first login to my fileserver, which is coincidentally a Linux system as well, but it doesn't have to be. In fact, I'm actually connecting to it using Samba. Then, I simply use the DD command:
dd if=[The partition you want to image] of=[The location of the file to save]
So, in my exact case, I mounted the fileshare at /ramdisk/bkup, and my partition was /dev/hda1, so:
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/ramdisk/bkup/WinXPSP2.img